Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories

In the winter of 2016 English Heritage sent some of the UK's
finest contemporary writers to stay at different sites of historical importance
across the UK. From Max Porter at Eltham Palace to Mark Haddon deep in York's
Cold War Bunker their experiences informed their chilling creations. Eight
authors, eight ghost stories, eight unsettling, supernatural creations set
loose in time for Halloween.

With a foreword by Andrew Martin and fascinating background
detail on English Heritage sites and their supernatural legacies, this is a
book to be savoured - and read aloud - as the nights draw in this winter.

Beneath Dover Castle, an imposing Gothic bulk atop the chalk
hills of the English port, is a labyrinth of tunnels. Dug in the 18th century
for troops garrisoned there as a first line of defence against revolutionary
France, the tunnels have recently developed a ghostly reputation.

Once a month, English Heritage, which manages the site,
evacuates the tunnels for staff to perform sweeps, searching for any of the
mysterious figures that tourists have reported seeing. In one report, a heavy
door slammed shut and a stretcher trolley, part of a wartime exhibit, raced
along the corridor as if pushed by a violent force. In another, a stranger in
wartime fatigues approached a small boy asking for his help to find “Helen”
(neither man nor his quarry were found).

With such tales coming out from many of its historic sites,
it is a little surprising that English Heritage felt it needed to recruit
authors to invent new ghost stories. But the charity has commissioned eight –
including Jeanette Winterson, Mark Haddon and Sarah Perry – to contribute to
Eight Ghosts, a collection of spectral tales set in some of its spookier sites,
including Dover Castle, Hadrian’s Wall and Audley End.

Ghost stories and the gothic tend to have a resurgence in
the aftermath of periods of rationalism and scientific advance

Some of the authors did not have to travel far from their
own geographical origins. Glaswegian Kate Clanchy chose Housesteads Roman Fort
on Hadrian’s Wall, Northumberland, while Perry chose Audley End in Essex, which
she visited as a child. Others chose more unusual settings: Haddon used the
York Cold War Bunker – described by English Heritage as its “most modern and
spine-chilling” site – while Jeanette Winterson selected Pendennis Castle,
Cornwall.

Location is vital to a good ghost story, and ancient houses
and abandoned barracks are standard tropes in a genre that has deep roots in
English architecture; from Mr Lockwood’s bedroom in Wuthering Heights to the
Dartmoor manor in Catherine Fisher’s Chronoptika series. As Andrew Michael
Hurley, author of horror novel The Loney and, in Eight Ghosts, a story set in
the dungeons of Carlisle Castle, says: “Buildings, like ghosts, are things that
endure beyond the usual human span of life. They are the theatres in which the
past may be replayed.”

Kamila Shamsie saw the ruins of Kenilworth Castle as “like a
bombed-out building”, making them a perfect backdrop to her tale of the
castle’s night security guard, who has arrived in England from an unnamed
war-torn country and is facing the horrors of his past through the prism of a
night in which the events may be real or imagined.

“I drew very much on the ghost stories that the English
Heritage staff at Kenilworth told me – stories of voices from behind locked
doors, presences felt in the kitchen,” the Burnt Shadows author says. A
specific architectural feature of the building niggled her imagination, she
adds: “I noticed that the guidebook kept referring to unusually large windows
built into Kenilworth Castle through the centuries – it raised the question:
did they want to let in the light or were they afraid of something in the
dark?”

Elizabethan Gardens
Open At Kenilworth Castle After ReconstructionKENILWORTH, ENGLAND - APRIL 30:
Historic interpreters Hilary Janewood and Charles Neville re-enact a meeting
between Queen Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester in the new Elizabethan
Gardens in the grounds of Kenilworth Castle on April 30, 2009 in Kenilworth,
England. English Heritage has reconstructed the pleasure gardens created by
Robert Dudley the Earl of Leicester which he built to impress and court Queen
Elizabeth I over 400 years ago. The garden has painstakingly been re-created
with the aid of archaeology and historic notes and cost over GBP 2.1 million.
(Photo by Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)

Historic interpreters re-enact a meeting between Queen
Elizabeth I and the Earl of Leicester in the grounds of Kenilworth Castle.
Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The architecture of ghost stories is based in the landscape
of memory, whether real or imagined, which often means they contain a dreamlike
quality – think of the nightmarish glimpse of the sheet-wrapped ghost in MR
James’s Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You My Lad. Perry, who visited the Great
Hall at Audley End for the first time in 20 years for her story, had this
uncanny feeling while gazing at the Jacobean splendour: “I thought I’d
forgotten it all – but there was the yew hedge looking like black stormclouds,
and the fire buckets hanging from the ceiling, as if I remembered it all from a
dream.”

There are creepy exceptions to the gothic homes and castle
ruins: the York Cold War Bunker may be a modern structure, but Haddon calls it
“a genuinely disturbing place … It was in use during my lifetime in the
expectation that the majority of the human race might be burned from the
surface of the earth,” he says. “You don’t get that kind of frisson at
Kenilworth Castle.”

York Cold War Bunker
was in active service from the 1960s-90s and was designed as a nerve-centre to
monitor fall-out in the event of a nuclear attack.

York Cold War Bunker was in active service from the
1960s-90s and was designed as a nerve-centre to monitor fall-out in the event
of a nuclear attack. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

The popularity of ghost stories has been tied to societal
change: in Victorian times, with their servants suddenly popping out of hidden
passages around their creaky, gaslit houses, and spiritualism coming into
vogue, the middle classes marvelled at the ghostly possibilities of new
technologies such as radio and telephones, setting new parameters for what was
possible. Their popularity today, Perry believes, reflects the insecurities of
our age. “Ghost stories and the gothic tend to have something of a resurgence
in the aftermath of periods of rationalism and scientific advance, as if the
reader sighs and thinks: wouldn’t it be nice if there was more to it all than
this?” she says.

Haddon believes this hunger, for something beyond what is
provable, is what drives writers to the genre. The self-proclaimed “ardent
materialist” says: “I think a lot of literature is driven by a desire to find
some kind of doorway into that other place. To look at it another way, isn’t
the function of all fiction to bring the dead to life?”

Eight Ghosts: The English Heritage Book of New Ghost Stories
is published in October 2017 by September Publishing.